Friday, September 27, 2013

AIG CEO Robert Benmosche Compares Bonus Criticism to Lynch Mobs

AIG has a lengthy history of producing some of the biggest tools on Wall Street. Former CEO Maurice "Hank" Greenberg was considered one of the world's preeminent unapologetic narcissists even before he sued the government for providing an insufficiently generous bailout. Joe Cassano, former chief of AIG's financial products division, was another. First, he arrogantly blew off the accountants who warned him his portfolio of hundreds of billions in uncollateralized bets might destroy the world. Then, after it all went kablooey, he tiptoed back to D.C. (after first being assured of not being prosecuted, mind you) from his lavish four-story townhouse in London just long enough to tell the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that he had absolutely nothing to be sorry about and they could bite him and his hundreds of millions in earnings if they disagreed.

Now a third AIG executive enters the pantheon of tone-deaf AIG bigwigs: CEO Robert Benmosche, who just told the Wall Street Journal that the post-crash public outcry over the use of bailout money to pay bonuses to executives in Cassano's Financial Products unit was comparable to – get this – lynchings in the deep south. From reporter Leslie Scism's interview:

The uproar over bonuses "was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitch forks and their hangman nooses, and all that – sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago]. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong."

Musicians

Quotes

"The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities." — Adam Smith (1723-1790)

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country." — Thomas Jefferson

"A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay." — Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888)

"... to waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed." — Theodore Rosevelt

"Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite
world is either a madman or an economist." — Kenneth Boulding
(1910-1993)

Tom Maertens served as National Security Council director for nonproliferation and homeland defense under Presidents Bill Clinton and
George W. Bush, and as deputy coordinator for counterterrorism in the State Department during and after 9/11. Before retiring from the U.S. Foreign Service in 2002, he had served in Ethiopia, Colombia, the USSR, Panama, Austria, and Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
(See all of Tom Maertens' articles here.)

Leigh Pomeroy has written on subjects ranging from politics to health care to film to wine. He has assisted on two books, Dr. D's Handbook for Men Over 40 by Dr. Peter Dorsen and Not What the Doctor Ordered by Jeffrey C. Bauer. In 2004, he was the DFL (Democratic Party) Candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives in Minnesota's 1st Congressional District. He teaches writing and film at Minnesota State University, Mankato. (See all of Leigh Pomeroy's articles
here.)